UN Mute Over NATO's Syrian Death Squads

Editor's Note: Brookings has since taken down Middle East Memo #21 - it has been reposted by Land Destroyer here in its entirety.

May 2, 2012 - Since 2011, reports of arsonists and gunmen amongst Syria's opposition have been included in reports regarding the unrest in Syria, albeit buried under sensational headlines of the Syrian government's "brutality." More recently, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has conceded that indeed the Syrian opposition "Free Syrian Army" is conducting widespread, systematic abuses including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of both security forces and civilians.

The HRW report titled, "Syria: Armed Opposition Groups Committing Abuses,"
is broken into three parts; kidnapping, torture, and executions. And
while the report attempts to focus mainly on atrocities carried out
against security forces and government supporters, the mention of
civilian victims is made as well. The report states:

"Abuses
include kidnapping, detention, and torture of security force members,
government supporters, and people identified as members of
pro-government militias, called shabeeha. Human Rights Watch has also
received reports of executions by armed opposition groups of security
force members and civilians."

Now, almost daily, the Syrian opposition is carrying out vicious attacks not only on security forces, but a terrorist bombing campaign across Syria that has already killed and maimed scores of civilians. While the Syrian opposition claims it lacks the ability to carry out such attacks, the opposition is exposed as very well armed, their fighters sheltered in NATO member Turkey, its leadership sheltered in Washington and London, and their fighters wielding not only an endless supply of small arms, but rocket propelled grenades, mortars, missiles, and even tanks.

Image: Brookings Institution's Middle East Memo #21 "Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf)," makes no secret that the humanitarian "responsibility to protect" is but a pretext for long-planned regime change.

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The Syrian government has claimed it has documented a long list of ceasefire violations by the rebels - a list that is confirmed daily in headlines from across the biased Western media, still attempting to depict the violence as one-sided. There are sea-raids carried out at night with the precision of Western special forces, terror bombings against civilian targets admittedly carried out by rebels, and now a daily campaign of bombs so overt and atrocious, even the Western corporate media must now acknowledge a "shift" in tactics.

A recent Reuters article titled "Outgunned Syria rebels make shift to bombs," includes admissions from the rebels themselves that they are behind the spat of bombings ravaging Syria - bombs the Western press and opposition leaders had previously tried to blame on "false flag" attacks carried out by the Syrian government to undermine the rebels' legitimacy.The Reuters article concedes that while the FSA officially is "upholding" the UN truce, its fighters have outright rejected it and are indeed openly in violation of the ceasefire.

The Reuters report also confirms Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's statement that his security forces were fighting armed militants - not protesters and civilians - in security operations across Syria before the UN ceasefire came into effect. The reports states:

"Since the army routed them from their
strongholds in cities, some rebels said they realized that even in
guerrilla street battles they could not beat Assad's tanks or artillery. The
Syrian Liberation Army's spokesman Qdemati said his group's fighters
were now focusing most of their attention on "manufacturing facilities"
for bombs. "You are going to start seeing an escalation as we improve our techniques of bomb-making and delivery.""

Not only does this confirm that the Syrian rebels have resorted to indiscriminate terrorist tactics, but reveals again that government claims that an explosion in the city of Hama that killed 70, devastating much of a city block, was in fact a mishap at a rebel bomb-making facility. BBC amazingly attempted to peddle the opposition's explanation, claiming the Syrian government possibly fired a "SCUD missile" at the city.

Now however, all pretenses have been dropped and it is admitted that the Syrian rebels are manufacturing and deploying indiscriminate bomb devices nationwide. The Syrian rebels have been noted as terrorists, both foreign and domestic since nearly the beginning of the fighting last year by the alternative media. The Western press has attempted to obfuscate this fact for as long as possible, already irreparably undermining their own legitimacy in the process.

The UN, NATO, and complicit media outlets across the West, by contradicting a growing awareness of the reality of both the terroristic nature of the Syrian rebels, and the depth of deceit directed against the global public in regards to the conflict in Syria since the beginning, undermines entirely the legitimacy they and the "international law" they claim to uphold, have. In regards to Libya, US think-tank the Brookings Institution openly stated that it was about asserting the "primacy of international law" over the nation-state.

When such gross injustices, deceit, and hypocrisy exist under "international law" in both Libya and now Syria, it is clear that such "international law" is but a system of control exercised by a minority against others on a global scale. "International law" is revealed as merely the neo-imperial edicts of the global corporate-financier oligarchs, dressed up as "humanitarian concerns" even as they prop up terrorists from Libya to Syria, and beyond. Even as the UN begins to admit that indeed the Syrian rebels are in violation of the ceasefire, they only do so as the violence runs demonstratively rampant and out of control.

Photo: It must be remembered, that not only are Syria's rebels committing horrific atrocities amidst an admittedly terroristic campaign against the Syrian people, they do so with arms, funding, equipment, training, and political support from the "Friends of Syria" cadre including the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

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Surely the UN doesn't expect the world to believe rebels are picking their bomb-making materials and Kalashnikovs from Syria's cypress trees - and knows full well such weapons, training, and cash are flowing over the borders, admittedly from the US-led "Friends of Syria" cadre to support what is now clearly a terrorist campaign in direct violation of the UN's own "peace deal."

Unfortunately, the UN will not demand an end to, or even mention the West's support of the Syrian rebels, and instead use the violence to continue with their original plan - the establishment of "humanitarian corridors" and "safe zones" by armed NATO troops. From these established zones, the rebels can continue their campaign of violence against the Syrian people in pursuit of dividing and destroying Syria as a sovereign nation-state, in line not with "international law," but in the interests of Western imperial ambitions.